Lima esta cerrado los lunes. Lima is closed on Mondays. Well not really, just the major museums. I decide to take a tour out to Islas Palominos, which advertises sea wolves and Humboldt penguins as their major attractions. What is a sea wolf? No idea. On the way to the port area to catch the catamaran, I tried to elicit from Ruiz, the driver, what exactly a sea wolf is. Im guessing a seal, but Ruiz tells me they are like foxes, but brown. Que? Foxes? I think something is getting lost in translation. Like catamaran. Getting to the boat requires jumping on to a small motorised dinghy, which takes the 8 passengers out into the harbour. When I see the size of the boat we are taking, I think that I will regret not having taken a heavy duty sea sickness tablet last night. Usually Im fine if Im outside, so I take a seat on the padded seat at the front of the boat – it’s that or the back of the boat, which is more of a dive boat than a catamaran. The crew offer a just-in-time sea sickness tablet with an “I recommend you take this” thrown in for good measure. Uh-oh. It is 90 minutes to Islas Palominas. I make it to the 75 minute mark before I lose my breakfast over the side into a strong swell. On cue, a pod of dolphins appear, possibly attracted by a possible meal of french toast. The crew are very well prepared for this eventuality and are armed with what can only be described as dog poo bags and paper towels.
The sea wolves turn out to be sea lions. I now understand how long-ago sailors thought these guys were mermaids – from a distance, the noise they make sounds like raucous singing, but up close you’d have to be squinting or barfing up your breakfast to confuse them with flaxen-haired semi-nude females with flippers. A couple of mad tourists don wetsuits and swim with the sea lions, who don’t seem to mind sharing the polluted coastal waters off Lima one bit. Things turn surreal on the way back. I could swear that the tugboat (below) was playing ‘Love will keep us aliveʼ over its loudspeaker. In English.
One of the many things I didn’t know about Lima before I arrived is that it is an extension of the Atacama Desert, so it virtually never rains – all of the water comes from rivers running down from the Andes. The other is that wastewater flows into the Pacific Ocean, contaminating the sea and beaches for quite a few miles out. There is a big project underway apparently to redirect the city’s waste water to a new park area and to treat the effluent rather than to have it run into the sea. As always, there is a hardy bunch of surfers waiting to catch a waver off Miraflores, but one whiff of the water would have any sane person decline to enter the water anywhere in the vicinty of Lima.
The other thing I didn’t know about was the high incidence of TB in Lima. As I was recovering in the excellent Sama cafe attached to the Casa Andina Private Collection hotel in Miraflores, Matias struck up a conservation with me. E-readers are great conversation starters. Matias was also sitting in the cafe and asked whether I liked my Kindle. Which led to a whole conversation on my Kobo (blank look – what’s that?) and to the fact that Matias was a Lima native who had lived in the US for the last 20 years and was now back in Lima for 1 year to work on a public health project related to halting the spread of MDR tuberculosis. I had assumed that TB was heading to the same fate as smallpox, but in fact it is on the increase, and in particular is prevalent in large poor districts of Lima and is becoming increasing drug-resistant.
